During the past fifty years, electronic computing systems have evolved from elaborate, room-sized, vacuum-tube-based behemoths to fantastically fast and efficient, by comparison, integrated-circuit-based computer systems, including extremely powerful, multiple-vector-processor and massively parallel supercomputer systems. In high-end supercomputer systems, great attention is spent to design efficient interprocessor communications and to organize processors spatially within the supercomputer systems in order to provide short, reasonably direct, high bandwidth interconnections between the processors to allow for distribution of computing tasks among multiple processors.
The extremely high switching speeds of current submicroscale and nanoscale electronic circuits are sufficiently fast that an electronic signal representing a first logical state may only travel a few tenths of centimeters, at the speed of light, along a signal path before a signal from a next state is generated by a processor. Because communications paths are limited in the number of logical states that can be communicated within the signal path at a given instant in time, the physical separation of processors interconnected by metallic wires or optical light paths may therefore introduce significant processing delays in multiple-processor systems. Improved methods and techniques for parallel processing, including improved compiler technology and improved algorithmic methods for decomposing large tasks into separate, parallel tasks, have allowed for potentially efficient use of greater numbers of processors in massively parallel computer systems. Such configurations have resulted in ever decreasing miniaturization of integrated circuits with corresponding increasing densities, both within integrated-circuit devices, as well as in multi-integrated-circuit-component devices, such as multi-processor devices. However, both in single integrated-circuit systems, as well as in multi-component systems, the trend towards increasing component densities is balanced by the need to provide high bandwidth interconnections between components, to provide direct access to components, and to provide pathways by which heat can be dissipated. Thus, designers and manufacturers of high-end, multi-component computer systems and other electronic systems continue to seek methods for organizing electronic components, such as integrated circuits, within multi-component devices to provide both high-component-density arrangements as well as accessibility and interconnectivity.